


apple tradition

by hongmunmu



Category: Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Backstory, Denerim, Elven Alienages, Family, Gen, Origin Story, rape mention, tabris family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-23
Updated: 2016-08-23
Packaged: 2018-08-10 15:17:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7850143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hongmunmu/pseuds/hongmunmu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You don't get to grow up slowly in the alienage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	apple tradition

Shianni’s hair was apple-red. She always smelled of apples, actually. Even before she started frequenting the cider. 

As children, they’d started a little tradition. Their grandmother, her salt-white hair strung up into a bun so tight Ilai always thought it an attempt to pull her skin tighter over her face, rocked in her creaky wooden chair, humming. She used to sing many songs of the sea and sky and apple pie, when they were truly young, perhaps too young to remember properly. As time passed her tired old throat gave out, and her songs gradually turned to simple hums, tunes which were less listened to, and more heard. Quieter with each day. Ilai wondered if she was no longer capable of speech, or if perhaps she simply lacked the energy to form words.

As the children grew older they came to realise that perhaps they would not have much longer with their grandmother. Cyrion had told them quietly, as she slept in her creaking chair by the fire. Or perhaps they only thought she slept. It became hard to tell, with her permanent silence and her infrequent movement. Shortly after Cyrion broke the news of her impending illness on them, Ilai had joked that they wouldn’t know when she had passed away. It was in poor taste and and Adaia smacked him over the head with her shoe. 

Some days later Ilai and Shianni headed out into the market. They stood out more than the majority of alienage children, what with Ilai’s white hair and Shianni’s apple-red. Barefoot, dirty-faced, black lines underneath their chipped fingernails, two teeth missing from their wide impish grins, they stole brilliant pink apples from the market. Shianni playing the store-owner for a fool while Ilai sneaked the fruit onto his person, inside his oversized shirt where they stopped at the belt and weighed the coarse cloth down. Shianni giggled that he looked like a sack of potatoes as they ran back home through the back-way alleys; Ilai responded by bunching up the apples in his shirt into two lumps over his chest, and jiggling them like they were human breasts all the way home.

  
“Tit apples,” he announced, spilling them out onto the table from inside his shirt, and Adaia’s shoe reintroduced itself to his head. One, for saying Tit because it’s a Bad Word That Only Shems Use, and two, because he Stole. She didn’t really mind about number two, though. 

Ilai and Shianni made pie with the apples. It was terrible, and laced with dirt from their unwashed children’s fingernails, and Cyrion admonished them and said the apples were worth more on their own than they were after being made into a pie. Grandmother chuckled though, her bald little gums and wrinkled lips creased into a smile as she ate the soft cooked apples with brown sugar. Ilai and Shianni repeated this activity again for three more years; in the first, Adaia disappeared. The second, Shianni’s mother died, and the third, so did her father. All sucked up by the plague, Soris said.

On the fourth year, their grandmother was beginning to unravel, like an old piece of clothing with threads beginning to wear out, rips and seams loosening beyond repair. She ate their pie one more time, and the family of five-minus-one went to sleep. And in the night, as Ilai got out of the shared bed to take a piss, he saw his grandmother, rocking gently by the empty fireplace, trying not to creak her creaky chair. 

“Always crying,” she murmured, not looking at him. “Crying for mamae.”

Ilai said nothing and took his piss.

“The pie was better the first time,” she said. 

Ilai got back into bed. 

Their grandmother was dead the next morning. At first, no one even noticed. 

Shianni and Ilai kept making pie every year.

* * *

  
Ilai had his ear pierced when he was ten by some friends outside the alienage, a couple of snot-nosed, dark-haired human boys, as a dare. They plunged a dirty needle into his lobe before following up with the ring his mother had left behind for him. Put off by the pain, he denied having the other one pierced under the pretence he only had one earring (not necessarily a lie, though not his main reason). The piercing naturally became infected and oozed blood and pus for days. Shianni gazed at it with a morbid fascination while Cyrion chided her for being unladylike, and Ilai for being Too Lady Like. Nevertheless, the wound healed and the earring stayed.

It impressed Nessa ( who became his on-and-off girlfriend when he was fourteen, and broke up with him when he was sixteen, because his life was becoming too violent for her and her father - who had always been a strict man - didn't want her to see him anymore. They stayed friends, and he stopped her father from taking her away from the alienage on his wedding day. ) 

He’d started to venture out of the alienage when he began to understand that his family needed money; doing odd jobs for merchants in the square or otherwise sitting by a wall and waiting for some rich, noble-hearted Orlesian or upper-class snob to walk by so he could bombard them with stories of his poor sick mother being the only family he had left. Occasionally this earned him a black eye, but it was worth it for the bronzes or occasional silver he brought in. When he became too old to appeal to the Good Hearts Of Rich Shems, he turned to other methods of bringing in money instead; either smuggling or assassination. Old-fashioned. Some man named Ignacio hired him for small jobs which weren’t worth people as renowned as the Crows, and didn’t pay as well. It was during one of these missions that Ilai lost his sense of smell; a small trap laid in lieu of a guard to ward off assassins. Some form of gas; admittedly, Ilai didn’t remember the details. He never killed the mark. Eventually he realised that he was being exploited as his missions got harder but pay remained stagnant; after prompt refusal for increases, he dropped the job and his trips outside the alienage. 

Jobs inside the small gated community were considerably less interesting, and pay didn’t come close to the meagre amounts Ignacio had left him, but there was something gratifying about knowing that you were cheating no-one and no-one was cheating you. Shianni and he gradually stopped spending their money on baking materials, and switched to alcohol. Ilai could no longer smell the apples, but somehow Shianni reminded him. With her red bob-hair and hot, heavy alcohol-breath. 

As time passed his disgust grew. It was only well after he had left the alienage that he came to realise the rape of Shianni was not his fault nor that of the alienage; it was the humans, and downgrading of women and elves alike. He came to loathe the quartermasters of army camps with their elven subordinates; came to loathe the kitchens worked by bony underfed elven servants as an overfed human directed them, and collected their pay at the end of the week. 

After the Blight was over, he returned to the alienage for several weeks. Shianni was still a terrible cook, and so was he. At least they didn’t have to steal the apples, or flour, or brown sugar. They were still a family.


End file.
